41–50 of 257 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. The next administration might actually be tougher re: pro-worker laws against multi-national importers of Chinese made stuff. This might not apply to unions necessarily though.
> re: pro-worker laws against multi-national importers of Chinese made stuff. The pro-worker stuff was just to attract that demographic, I'm pretty sure.
Just to play devil's advocate here, this is from the article: > The app, called WorkIt, invites users to register by providing a name, email, telephone number and ZIP Code. Users can also s hare (sic) their job title and Wal-Mart store number.... That is a bunch of personally identifying information. You can easily steal somebody's identity with those bits of information, or at least have a good idea of who they are.…
"Locked down racks" is complete FUD. It's not like there's HIPAA or PCI compliance issues here. Incompetently managed bare metal servers are just as hackable, perhaps more so, than incompetently used cloud IaaS. Workers should be careful, but storage has absolutely nothing to do with this.
That was my point. I'd much rather have them Amazon boys or Google boys take care of my data than my own sysadmin team - the Amazon/Google sysadmins are sharp, they apply all patches, and they have procedures in place to make sure they don't do anything incredibly stupid.
The fact they don't mention how they store any of this information that could have potential career altering affects bothers the heck out of me. I'd much rather they just say that they stored everything in AWS, than run their own bare metal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2. More than you can imagine. Technology should be bringing an end to sharecropping, not further increasing economic inequality.
I should have a pony.
The future is what we make of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But not in one giant queryable SQL table. I'd worry about parallelized spearfishing attacks across multiple stores, "Good Morning DEF, have I reached store number 12345 cash handling office? OK good to hear, this ABC at walmart corporate IT calling back about that trouble ticket your coworker XYZ entered about your store in Springfield, is XYZ at work now? Oh OK, well, anyway the ticket says XYZ is having trouble acc…
I don't think labor unions are goi to run a scam like that. This is ridiculous. Walmart has all this information in dbs right now and they're way more likely to get hacked.
I have faith that the app market is so hypersaturated that any scheme that doesn't epic fail immediately spawns hundreds of clones.
"Our Walmart" is probably legit, although probably a smaller harder to defend target and the problem is going to be inevitable clones and scams.
There is also the meta-threat of normalizing sharing employer information. Sure maybe 99% of people who ask for my IP address or a list of ciphers my sshd permits are really not up to anything bad, but it would be bad to get in the habit of telling rando requesters anything they ask. So, among others, I allow aes256-gcm in my corporate sshd config... and what possible good could come from people answering questions like that ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced by your argument. People freely give away this information and more to facebook, etc.
But not in one giant queryable SQL table. I'd worry about parallelized spearfishing attacks across multiple stores, "Good Morning DEF, have I reached store number 12345 cash handling office? OK good to hear, this ABC at walmart corporate IT calling back about that trouble ticket your coworker XYZ entered about your store in Springfield, is XYZ at work now? Oh OK, well, anyway the ticket says XYZ is having trouble acc…
Facebook has a larger user base with richer data on them, than the app in the story. None of that data is E2E encrypted, and all of it is available to (some) FB employees.
I think your FUD is unjustified here.
It's an illegal labor practice in the US for an employer to do that. It's interference with the right to bargain collectively. But WalMart probably doesn't have much to fear from the Labor Department. Even under the current administration, enforcement is weak, and it will probably be weaker under the next administration. It's really tough to organize a union today, even though the law as written is pro-union.
They're not interfering with the right to bargain collectively though. For all we know, they're genuinely warning their employees that they may be involved in a PII collection scam. They can't reprimand/dismiss you for using the app, but surely they can tell you it's unwise. I don't see why people are so quick to tie Wal-Mart to the pyre; for what they pay, their employees are satisfied to an outsized degree. Given t…
They have every incentive to prevent unionization. If workers have room to negotiate, that means they could negotiate for fair compensation. Reminder that our country's labor history is rife with straight up mass murder of workers because they demanded fair pay, safe working conditions and anything but 12hr work days all week. Even the suggestion of possible unionization would leave innocent people dead.
Walmart has done nothing to be given the benefit of the doubt and to do so is to be willfully ignorant of our past and present.
> for what they pay, their employees are satisfied to an outsized degree
Weird that Walmart relies heavily on the state to subsidize benefits and compensation through welfare, Medicaid and food stamps that they should be paying out to their employees from their massive profits.
They refuse to give people enough hours for full time employment to avoid their duty to their employees, despite people begging for more hours.
"Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance" http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if we recognize that it is yet another chat app, like every other chat app, why are people even downloading it in the first place to prompt Wal-mart to feel the need to issue a statement?
It only has the privacy profile of a chat app. The "OUR Walmart" app offers other functionality, like legal advice and concerns specific to employees, that I would imagine I would love were I an employee myself. That said, I don't think it's out of order for... whatever OUR walmart is (a union?) to release a privacy statement. But painting them as identity thiefs, phishers, or ad resellers is absurd. In my view, Walm…
What part of their concern do you not believe is real? If I were Walmart, I would certainly be concerned about others trying to gain intelligence on me.
> like legal advice and concerns specific to employees
Well, that certainly sounds like a really good way for information, that Walmart may not want just anyone to know, to leak. Maybe the intentions of OUR Walmart is nothing but pure, and hope for nothing but the best for Walmart, but I don't see what benefit there is in being so trusting? Security is about always mitigating the attack vectors, after all.
Besides, why should we believe a service named "OUR Walmart" does not want to know anything about Walmart?
> The app, released on Android phones Monday Why Android only?
android is more prevalent in lower income workers. More of the potential users would use android thus they develop on the predominant platform first.
At my socioeconomic level when I want to blow some cash or show off some money I go on a thousands of dollar vacation travel or maybe buy a new car, for me its enough to show I have some dough, but its cheap enough to fit my cash flow.
Likewise a step or two or three downward, their way of flashing cash is the $400 sneakers or $400 video game system or in this specific case, the $400 iphone. They may have saved from months of paychecks to afford it, but I'm not really all that different other than I went to Ireland instead. Or I bought a car mostly in cash. Its the same behavior at a different scale.
Android is definitely in the middle, from what I observe. No one over $400K or under $40K has an android phone, at least not that I've seen.
Just to play devil's advocate here, this is from the article: > The app, called WorkIt, invites users to register by providing a name, email, telephone number and ZIP Code. Users can also s hare (sic) their job title and Wal-Mart store number.... That is a bunch of personally identifying information. You can easily steal somebody's identity with those bits of information, or at least have a good idea of who they are.…
It's not PII [1]. That's an actual legal term. Workit apparently wants worker identifying information, and Walmart, like other employers are free to tell their workers not to provide it, but there's no ethical or legal reason they can give to workers not to use it. It's not unlike GlassDoor - lots of companies would prefer you didn't use it, but at the employee level, the advantage/disadvantage ratio is pretty in you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's totally unsurprising to hear. Wal-Mart apparently defaults to portraying unions as pure evil. I don't know what the current procedure is like, but they used to make new hires watch laughably biased "educational" videos about unions. I don't remember the contents in detail, just that they roughly reminded me of '80s anti-drug PSAs/specials, with union organizers essentially taking the place of the "drug pusher"…
It works, too. In the popular media, unions have been so thoroughly demonized for several decades. Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job. And the kinds of people who're going in for these job…
So they have largely buried the hatchet but it is the only place in the world that WalMart tolerates unions.